The Power of Headless Drupal in Software & Application Development

What is Drupal?

It’s a useful piece of software which allows you to create and manage digital content. You may already be using it to power your business’s website. It’s valued by high-end businesses and big educational and governmental organisations. Mainly because it’s able to architect and display complex content in specific ways. In a normal setup, a Drupal based website stores data and content in the backend. It then presents this data as the public facing website or web page as the front end. Now, more people are using Drupal 8 because of the unique benefits of “Headless Drupal.” We believe this is a powerful tool for helping your business gain momentum in software and application development; and here’s why…

What is Headless Drupal?

Where you’d normally store and present your data using Drupal, Headless Drupal allows you to still store the data in the backend. Yet, it lets you abstract it and present the public-facing front end using other technologies or devices. So where Headless Drupal is used, visitors to a website won’t directly interact with Drupal.

Instead, the pages they see are created with Javascript frameworks such as Backbone.js, Angular.js or React. The framework interprets the content stored in Drupal’s backend and produces the web page for the browser. Not only can content be managed in this way but data such as contact forms, sales leads and other requests can be stored centrally too.

For example, if you ran an online newspaper or magazine which publishes its content through various online sites and apps. You use Drupal to centrally manage all of your content, editorial workflows, and control where it gets published.

Headless Drupal in App Development

At Lightflows, we believe the main strengths of Headless Drupal lie in the power and flexibility of its back-end development. Where you can use Headless Drupal to power a database of content, you can then use APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to integrate this data with another system’s interface.

An example would be running a recruitment website. Using Headless Drupal to store all of your available vacancies would also allow these vacancies to be aggregated on other sites or viewed via a mobile application. Using APIs, Headless Drupal hides behind the scenes to provide the content for the application.

You can reap the benefits of Headless Drupal alongside any version of Drupal. When it comes to mobile app development, Drupal 8 makes the perfect back-end for a React-powered app. React Native can provide an especially engaging, responsive experience on mobile when backed up by Drupal 8’s cache system.

This is all useful information if you’re interested in having a mobile application for your business. Especially, if you’re already using Drupal to power your business’s website.

Headless Drupal can save you money too

You may have an app which needs to be regularly update with say, jobs, properties or other content. Your app developer may build you a separate piece of bespoke software or application for doing that. This often takes longer and leads to dreaded added costs for your business. Instead, why not leverage the power of one of the world’s most powerful CMS’s and use Drupal instead? Headless Drupal’s flexibility provides you with rich content editing abilities and powerful features which allow two systems to share existing and new data…

“We’re currently using Headless Drupal in developing a mobile application for one of our clients. The application retrieves all its content from the client’s website which Drupal powers. Having the two systems integrated allows “push notifications” to alert app-users of new information on the site, which makes their service far more efficient. We’ve enjoyed taking advantage of Drupal’s powerful features in this project and are looking forward to seeing the end results.”

Director of Web Technologies at Lightflows

We understand the key role efficient software and applications play in propelling the success of your business. That’s why we have a team of skilled developers who can work with you to design and develop a unique piece of software or application. Even if your current business website isn’t run on Drupal, we can help convert it to ensure you can reap the benefits of Headless Drupal. Feel free to contact us and you can find more information on our services page.